‘If you drive from the city of Ramallah to the village of Mughayyir, through the car window, you see ochre lands, olive trees, already harvested wheat fields, light-coloured buildings, and a bright blue sky. It’s a vision quite similar to what one might see if, crossing part of the Iberian Peninsula, you go from Sigüenza to Caleruega. All four places are shepherd towns. It was a journey that normally took about twenty minutes. Now, knowing that normalcy in Palestine has transformed into a state of permanent exception, to go from Ramallah to Mughayyir, you have to detour through two other towns further north, Turmus Aya and Khirbat ‘Abu Falah. The road is blocked not only by the Israeli army but also by settler checkpoints, making direct communication impossible, instead becoming circular and controlled. This is the route the artist Lara Salous took to meet some shepherds collaborating on her project.
The paths traditionally used by shepherds worldwide followed the itinerant lines made by herbivorous animals seeking spontaneous pastures before anyone domesticated anyone. Around these natural routes, organisms and materials travelled, forming the basis for symbiotic cohabitation. Around them, communal uses, shared tasks, and living organizations, including human ones, were established. Today, they must be traced among city streets and roads that have turned those agricultural transits into industrial ones. This change imposes violence on the inhabitants of the land and on the ways of life that can be established on it. This movement is what Lara began to study.
Her research recovers ancient practices and knowledge that, like the woven threads of wool, intertwine with the ways of living of the peoples who have inhabited the continental lands east of the Mediterranean. A history that shapes an identity rooted in that land long before geopolitical borders existed.
The existence and origin of that culture have been denied by others who have successively imposed themselves on this territory. They shared the imagery that the desert is empty; nothing inhabits it. Therefore, the colonization of nothingness in search of planting a developmental seed was allowed. Thus, Europe arrived—not only here but throughout the Geopolitical South—and just as it left, it allowed others, now Europeans but of Semitic origin, to settle without asking, in the form of the state of Israel. An occupation that, for European nations, solved the problem of an unwanted community and sought to absolve the guilt for the negligence that almost enabled its extermination in Central Europe.
Acting without asking is a form of coercion. Control over movement is a form of intimidation. An imposition excused by previous suffering is also a form of attack. Violence only begets violence. Nothing justifies violence.
The policies that the state of Israel exerts over Palestine are horizontal pressure. It is a barbarism that extends across the territory. The lines traced by sheep and shepherds have been forgotten to draw, again and again, a geopolitical division that imposes, occupies, and expels.
These forces have changed the landscape, but the sense of belonging remains. The attachment to the land that sustains and the identity built on the relationship with the territory are part of the community that has become the land. We became the land, the title of the exhibition, sums up their feelings as Salous has found, tracing this heritage and reality.
Almost a year ago, Lara called me and told me she had gone to film the spinners she collaborates with for her textile recovery project—just when the war intensified. She told me she was going to continue her work in the West Bank, although she couldn’t stop thinking about the continuous bombings in the Gaza Strip.
She talked about seeing two types of violence being inflicted on Palestinian land and identity. The horizontal, through control and exhaustion of the population that is suffered throughout the state, and the vertical, an incessant drip of direct attacks with different types of projectiles falling.
The works in this exhibition function as a cartography that tells us about these movements, disappearances, and resistances that miss the traces of the peaceful walking of animals when they grazed without worrying about the imposed limits of a border.’
Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo – Exhibition Curator –
https://martaramosyzquierdo.wordpress.com/
Commissioner Resident at
Condeduque Centro de Cultura Contemporánea,
1.
The Bleeding Ones, 2024
Several hanging wool threads drip slowly but continuously, like the vertically and constantly exerted violence.
2.
Debilitated Skins, 2024
Shorn sheep skins leave bald spots as if it were a disease. Their designs convey the new configurations of flock movements in increasingly narrow areas, with erratic displacements, in circles out of fear, or in isolated cells.
3.
From Ramallah to al Mughayyir, Now You Must Go Around Through Turmus Aya and Khirbat ‘Abu Falah, 2024
Captures the journey and necessary detour currently required to visit shepherds living in different now isolated areas in the West Bank.
4.
No Media Arrives Here, 2024
Recording of the artist’s computer screen, while accessing various Instagram profiles that document the violence Israeli settlers are currently exerting on grazing areas and shepherds. These are records of places and actions that happen without the press being able to record them, as they do not reach these areas.
5.
It Runs in Our Veins, 2024
Video-art presenting the resistance of Palestinian shepherds to being erased. In it, they recount how they herded as children, how they no longer have a place to do so, or how they can no longer sell wool they still shear only to have to discard it.
6.
What Remains?, 2022,
exhibited previously at Salons collective art exhibition at A.M.Q foundation, Curated by Yazid Anani
Installation of a traditional wool rug handwoven by Palestinian Bedouin women, usually used in living rooms. The piece is presented unstitched, causing the labour, time, and textile tradition to disappear and accumulate on the floor.
7.
Around Our Hands, 2023
Video art condenses the fight against the forgetting of manual spinning traditions, following the movements of the hands of five women who remember how they performed this activity and passed it on to the artist.
All artworks and photos are original and owned by the artist.
Credits are reserved for the video arts
July 2024
